Tavis Smiley Gives O’Reilly A Talking To About Fox News’ Hard Heartedness Over Trayvon Martin’s Death

If you’re a regular O’Reilly Factor watcher, you know that Bill O’Reilly has been on a tear about black crime as somehow “mitigating” racial profiing. It’s pretty infuriating because, when you look at the statistics, whites handily outdo blacks as criminals. It’s not even close. But O’Reilly has been holdinghimself up as some kind of racial truthteller by insisting that he’s reporting facts others dare not. And he’s using that, along withothers on Fox, to further malign African Americans by suggesting that they should focus on black criminals instead of George Zimmerman. However, Tavis Smiley visited The Factor tonight and set O’Reilly straight.

I have been criticalof Smiley in the past for not confronting Fox News bigotry. But I’ve got no complaints about tonight’s showing. He told O’Reilly:

When Sandy Hook happened, the empathy, and the appreciation… the humanity of those children was present all over Fox News and every place else as it should have been. African Americans are not seeing that same kind of empathy and appreciation for the humanity of Trayvon that they saw for the children of Sandy Hook. I’m waiting to hear, I haven’t heard it yet, I’m waiting to hear the NRA say that if Trayvon Martin had had a gun, he might still be alive today.

The bottom line is that race is still the most intractable issue in this country and when an adult can profile and stalk and kill a child in America, our democracy is threatened. The bottom line is this: that if Trayvon Martin had been Mark Zuckerberg, the most well-known white guy in America who walks around with hoodies on every day, he wouldn’t have been stalked, he wouldn’t have been killed.

The conversation moved on to cover black crime and Smiley’s suggested solution: stricter gun control. The entire discussion is worth watching. To give O’Reilly credit, he offered a spirited but fair debate.

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Exactly, Bemused… Leftists and moderates can give credit to the right. They can even give the small amount of credit the far right warrants at times. But the best you can hope for from the right is some small level of civility during the debate itself, before they aim all the venom at your back.

That said…

I hope that one day Smiley will directly address the racial poison this network uses to infect our national dialogue – and I hope that day comes soon.

I think that’s most people who aren’t a Fox/Rush apologist feel that way. I ended my media workday with this:

And I sincerely tried to write it up, but all I could do was type “F*ck you, Gutfeld. F*ck you too, Bolling.” I was just that shut down on the subject. Now, all I want to write with Fox’s name on it is an open letter to Ailes, telling him that there is no reality but the one in his head where his endorsement of all this doesn’t make him a racist. Maybe I’ll build up to that in the AM…

“The above is a telling example of an important difference between RWingers and LWingers. The former would have choked to death before giving any credit to an opponent. Especially one so morally challenged as Mr. O’Reilly has apparently become since he embraced the causes of yellow (aka biase, rabble-rousing) journalism.”

The above is a telling example of an important difference between RWingers and LWingers. The former would have choked to death before giving any credit to someone so morally challenged as Mr. O’Reilly has apparently become since he embraced the causes of yellow (aka biase, rabble-rousing) journalism.

The Zimmerman trial was clearly a travesty of justice. Although such things have and will always happen, there’s no denying that the USA has lost yet another occasion to live up to its claim to being a beacon of civilization, an example for the rest of the world.